OpenSubtitles forum

It may be because your text editor does not recognize properly the character encoding, and automatically opens the file with latin CP1252 encoding.
So you need to open the file with a text editor that lets you chose the encoding, eg Microsoft Word.

Open the sub file with MS Word, and select the encoding that will show correctly the text.
Then select UTF-8 encoding when saving the file to avoid further problems. UTF-8 encoding has the advantage over 8-bit encodings, to be automatically recognized by the vast majority of text editors.

Note: if you video reader does not read UTF-8, then it is time to change to a recent one...

EDIT: If you have weird characters using VLC player and don't want to manually convert your subs each time, go to Tools->Preferences->Subtitles and change the default encoding to your preferred one (eg Windows-1250 for Eastern European languages).

Another way to check weird characters is using Subtitle Edit: File -> Import subtitle with manual chosen encoding...

It will open a window where you can check different encodings, like this:


Besides ansi encoding, I've also seen people having trouble with UTF-7 (do use UTF-8 instead).

The above posts suggest to use UTF8 encoding. However, my television (LG Smart TV) doesn't handle them very well. Simple characters as the pound sign (£) get messed up. So I always have to save the files in Western 1252 if I want to play them on my tv. Anyone knows what could be causing this? It would suggest UTF8 is not always the preferred encoding then.

I am swapping around with utf-8 or 1252 preference:

UTF8 is clear and covering everything.
BUT
It is not widely supported

1252 is not covering everything
BUT
it is supported, even default on many players in 'my' area.

Unicode (UTF-8 is part of it) is a VERY GOOD invention. You realise that when you try to mix several languages in the same document. With codepage 1252 you can write English and several western languages but if you want to write some words in (let's say) Polish you're out of luck. Besides, codepage 1252 was designed by Microsoft. Then why should we adopt something develped by just one company? This is not standard. Not every person in the world, thank God, uses Windows. Unicode, in the other hand, is a real standard.

Now, thanks to Unicode and UTF-8 I can read files in any language and the characters are always correct. In the worst case, when the font doesn't support them, they are replaced by "?".

About the LG smart TV, it doesn't seen so smart to me. That's why I use a computer for almost everything. It is more programable and customizable.

I would say, if it doesn't support Unicode, don't buy it.

Thank you very much for this explanation, Admin Nike was having this same problem and you helped me solve it.
Congratulations